From the Tor/Forge blog, 6 questions with Russian author Lena Maydan, author of Twilight Forever Rising. The title is unfortunately reminiscent of a certain popular YA sparkly vampire series. About the book:
It is already a major Russian bestseller with over 80,000 copies sold to date in hardcover. Twilight Forever Rising is what happens when Anne Rice meets The Sopranos: a vampire-human love story in the midst of a brutal struggle among powerful aristocratic and everyday vampire families. Full of fascinating new vampire mythology as only a Russian can create with a contemporary story, complex characters, and wonderful prose, Twilight Forever Rising is an enthralling story of morality, friendship, power, and love.” (via SFScope.com)
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s short story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Penguin 2009) has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. The collection was translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. This has been on my list of books to read if I weren’t scared of scary stories. I might give it a try during the day when I’m surrounded by people. Yes, I scare easily.
This has already made the rounds, but the National Endowment for the Arts has a series of interviews with artists called Art Talk. One of the interviewees this week was translator Charlotte Mandell, who translated the much-anticipated Zone by Mathias Énard.
Translating a 500-page sentence combines the creativity of translating poetry with the challenge of translating difficult prose. Zone is narrated on a train, and it has the rhythmic, slightly lulling feeling of being on a train, but it also has a sense of urgency and inevitability in French that I wanted to recreate in English. I loved the continuity and flow of the text, and I really loved the experience of translating it—I was always mid-sentence, no matter where I stopped for the day! I never read ahead when I translate, so I was always wondering what was going to happen next in the story. Translating Zone was one of the most enjoyable translation experiences I’ve ever had.
By way of MediaBistro/Galleycat: Casagrande, a Chilean art collective, bombed Berlin with 100,000+ bookmarks. This is part of their Poetry Bomb project which started in 2001. They’ve targeted other cities, including Guernica and Warsaw.
In other prize news, finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize were announced this week.
E.J. Van Lanen blogged at Three Percent about a recent editorial trip to Finland. I found the Finnish publishers’ treatment of sample copies interesting:
The most interesting tidbit from this lecture was about ‘sample stock’. In Finland, every publisher sends one copy of each book they publish to every bookstore. The bookstores agree to keep that book in their store for one or two years. If that copy is sold, they agree to order a replacement copy and so on. If it isn’t sold in that time, they return it to the publisher. This is a fantastic, if not universally exportable, idea.
And now, Singapore’s tallest slide…in Chiang-Mai airport.
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http://www.itwasuphillbothways.com Topher